“Defiance” recap (1.09 and 1.10): Kaziris and Bridezillas

Hi ya, Gayliens! I apologize for short-shifting you on the Defiance recap last week. There’s so much lez/bi stuff happening on TV this summer — especially on Monday nights — that it’s proving tricky to keep up. Luckily, we didn’t miss any Sapphic shenanigans last week. The real crazytown bananapants stuff with Stahma and Kenya kicks off next week. So, please enjoy these two mini-caps of the last two weeks’ episodes and let’s meet back here next week to process all the feelings we feel.

1.09: If I Ever Leave This World Alive

There is a full plague consuming Defiance, and the townsfolk have started calling it Irath Flu because Irathients are carriers of it but are not affected by it. If you’ve seen one episode of this show, you know what’s coming: The council — including frakkin Datak Tarr now — vote to quarantine the Irathients because they’re all enormous racists and everybody loves to shit all over the knob-headed ones. (Except for Amanda, the lone dissenting vote.) None of the Irathients take the news well, especially not Irisa, and especially because they are all knelt down in prayer petitioning their god on behalf of the humans when Rafe McCawley & Co. show up to cart them away at gunpoint.

“…hallowed be my name.”

Nolan decides the best way to win back Irisa’s trust after he blasted her mentor off the arch a couple of weeks ago is to secure a cure for the plague so he can free all the Irathients. This, after a stand-off where he would have shot everyone in town to save his little girl if she hadn’t told him to put his gun away. Amanda tells Nolan he’s only acting reckless because he wants Irisa to like him again, but he doesn’t have to listen to her wisdom very long because she gets the plague too.

Nolan and Connor Lang, who is still in town and still wearing that hat, drive on out to the Badlands to fetch themselves a cure, even though they have to muscle their way through an Earth Republic contingent to get there. By the time they get back to town, Nolan’s pretty plague-ridden, which makes it’s even easier for a rogue band of Irathients to kidnap him and Connor and the plague meds. The only thing they want is for Defiance to free their brothers and sisters. Unfortunately: a) The brother of the Irath ringleader has already been killed by a jumpy mine worker, and b) Amanda is about five seconds from dying so she can’t really negotiate with them.

“And you’re sure a bath won’t cure this?”

Which, of course, means that Stahma orchestrates a grand plan that benefits literally everyone she loves. With one hand, she comforts her son’s ailing fiance, with another hand she tends to the sick the mayor, with another hand she shoves Rafe McCawley — acting mayor while Amanda is down — onto the ground near his daughter to grieve for her impending death, with another hand she answers the mayor’s phone, with another hand she coaxes Datak into pretending to be the mayor and liberating the plague meds from captivity, with another hand she frees the Iranthients, with another hand she writes some poetry and does some Castithan needlework. Like, in five minutes she accomplishes all that. Talk about a six-legged monkey crawl.

“With liberty and justice for Tarrs!”

Anyway, Datak hotfoots it over to the warehouse where Nolan and Connor are being held hostage. He monologues about how all humans deserve to burn in whatever the alien equivalent of hell is, but then kills all the kidnappers, and also Connor Lang, who just happened to see him begging for his life at one point. It’s no surprise, then, that he announces his candidacy for mayor on his son’s radio station while Stahma mouths the speech along with him, just as soon as the plague is cured.

Oh, and Mayor Nikki gets Luke McCawley to give her the Kaziri after she tells him his mother is alive and she can take him to her. Apparently, Luke’s mom was kind of messed up back in the early days of Defiance and Nikki kept her from killing her kids, for whom Nikki had a bit of affection because she was boning their father.